Slumber
by maebyfunkebluth
Summary: Veronica isn’t tired. More and more with each passing night she adjusts to the fact that she will never have to sleep anymore. The season finale was slightly different. A somewhat sad oneshot. Please read and review.


This is a very strange story that I wrote because I always wondered what would happen if things went a little differently during the season finale. It's sort of in a Lovely Bones type narrative, but that's not what I based it on. Please read and review, this is sort of a stretch for me and I would love constructive criticism, or basically any reviews. OK, here goes.

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Slumber

Veronica isn't tired. More and more with each passing night she adjusts to the fact that she will never have to sleep anymore. But she still can't get over this feeling, this overwhelming _wakefulness_ that has enveloped her like a cloud. Her skin is humming, and her nerves are standing on end. Her eyes are finely tuned and sometimes she thinks she could look out and see everything. She can almost feel the emotions in the air, smell them, hear them.

But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that she doesn't need to sleep, because there is nothing she needs to wake up for. No bacon grease permeating the air, no coffee to stumble out of bed for. She doesn't even have the comforting feel of her blankets bunched around her feet, tossed off by a night of unrest.

There is nothing here, nothing to do except watch. She watches when they find her body, watches when they find all of their bodies.

When she saw her corpse at first she recoiled and felt a phantom pain in her stomach, knew that if she could be sick, she would be nauseous. But she checks up on her body now and then, and the feeling eventually goes away. It's somewhat reassuring to see that her real body is decomposing, falling apart. Because that is change, it is natural change, something her life feels void of here. She watches all their funerals, and knows that if she could, she would cry.

Her funeral was beautiful, and it was completely full, bursting with people she found lost dogs for, or tracked down money, or maybe just people who pretended like they knew her. She'll never be sure, but she's almost certain it's the latter. Still it doesn't matter because the people she cared about were there. Wallace, who cried when he thought no one was looking, and a little when they were. He brought her a plate of snickerdoodles the day after and explained that this was sort of a Santa arrangement, he would leave her cookies, and she would look out for him wherever she was. He also brought Back-up one day who had promptly lay down and started drooling on the grass. He came back every day for a month after she died and told her on the last day of the month that he really didn't mind doing all those favors for her, even though he hated her guts (an exact quote), he loved her. He cried as he left her the last plate of cookies.

After that visit he was much more closed off, and she learned that Hearst had revoked his basketball scholarship because of an injury to his knee. He still cracked jokes to her, but he never cried again, and he got a job working for her father.

Her mom didn't come to the funeral, but two weeks after she died, an anonymous party donated 200 dollars and bought a stone angel to place above her gravestone. It was a pretty ugly angel, but Veronica didn't really mind, because when her mother visited, exactly three weeks, two days, and a month after her death, Lianne sat at her grave with her arms wrapped around that angel and told it about how she finally finished a rehab program and had been sober for a month.

That was the only time Veronica saw her mother, but she knew that if she wanted to, she could take just the smallest peek and see where her mother's life had taken her. Veronica never peeked, never needed to, because she finally had found closure with her estranged mother, albeit a closure that was too little and too late. But when the Jake Kane scandal came out, as everything was apt to in Neptune, she knew her mother got some pretty bad press, and whenever she thought about seeing what her mom was doing, the smell of gin and vermouth came wafting through the air.

Weevil, who had been acquitted on the charges out against him exactly two days after her funeral, left brightly colored roses on her grave every week. Sometimes they would be magenta, sometimes yellow, sometimes orange. He told her about his new bike, and sometimes he'd tell her about the other blond girl he knew who had died too young. He cried the most.

He would show up with new scars, bruised and bloody, and she was almost scared to find out where he got them. The Fitzpatricks held grudges for a long time, and Weevil had alienated a group of them during his brief incarceration, only adding fuel to the fire. Veronica worried about him sometimes, especially when he took over his cousin's chop shop as a front for his vigilante hunt against the crime family, spurred on by his missing sister. The flowers, cliché as they were, cheered her up, and she just didn't have the heart to find out why they became fewer and fewer.

Mac came to her funereal and sat in the very front. She had dyed her hair pitch black, but her clothes were vibrant shades of greens and oranges. Seeing her made Veronica smile a little. She was never the same as before, but she was surprisingly the one who had taken all the death easiest. At least that's what Veronica told herself before Mac took off, moved to Boston to go to MIT and have a nice normal life. Normal for Mac just didn't feel right. She had lost a piece of herself that night, almost as much as Veronica had. But Mac's loss was on a purely metaphorical level, while Veronica's was completely and viscerally not. Veronica felt strangely abandoned, even though she knew that she was the one who abandoned Mac.

Dick had come to her funereal, drunk and muttering swears under his breath. When almost everyone had left, he began brokenly crying, and shouting through his sobs that Veronica was a lying, trailer trash, frigid bitch. Her father was too exhausted to restrain him, and Lamb had to escort him off the cemetery.

Lamb was at her funeral mainly for PR purposes. He was quoted in the paper as saying, "I am very sorry such a energetic and lively young women's life was ended in such a horrible matter. The aftermath of this truly horrible crime affects us all." Veronica knew that Inga kept a photocopy of that response from the _Policeman's Speaking Guide _in her desk, along with what to tell the newspaper when they wanted to tastefully inform the public that the homeless man who slept in front of the supermarket had been arrested. But when he left her gravesite she heard him whisper under his breath, "Damn Veronica Mars. That girl…" And she smirked up wherever she was. Maybe Lamb in his screwed up way would miss her.

When Madison Sinclair became pregnant and tried to make him marry her, he sent her off to live somewhere else, and Veronica had watched him that night while he drank himself to sleep in his office. He talked to himself, mostly about the son that he had just pushed away and that little sorority piece of ass that was going to sue him. But as the night went on she heard him mumble her name alongside a, "God, I wish I knew what happened."

One night, almost a year after she died, a man snuck in to the cemetery with a squirming toddler under one arm, and left a single red rose on her grave. Duncan was always for the romantic gestures, and this time was no different. He whispered to her that he would love her forever, and that they were made for each other. But Veronica couldn't help but notice that Lilly Jr. looked more like Meg than ever.

Her father was a broken person after she died, and it hurt her to even think about him. When he heard the news of her death, he broke down in tears and cried for days. At the funeral he just stood there blindly while her casket was lowered into the ground, and he wandered around almost sleepwalking after. He kept the business, kept everything the same, her room, the office. It took him almost a year before he took on another case again, but soon he pushed himself into his work like it was the only thing in his life. He didn't care anymore about questionable morals, he helped everyone who came through the door of Mars Investigations and solved all the cases that came his way. She hurt so much inside whenever after a case where he helped find missing daughters, he would come home and make her favorite type of pasta. He even memorized the recipe for her Chocolate Cake a la Veronica. The cases that he finished became his life, and he poured his soul into them, making other people happy, giving them the rest of their lives. There was only one mystery he wouldn't touch.

At night he went into her bedroom and slept on the floor, careful not to disturb anything.

When Wallace came to work for him, Veronica could feel pinpricks behind her eyes, and if she could cry, she would've. Wallace opened the dusty door, and Keith gave him a huge hug. He took over her old job, and soon he was working alongside her father. Keith got closer to Alicia again, and although they never dated, they became close friends. Keith was surrounded by people, but Veronica knew how lonely he was. He was almost as alone as Veronica herself.

The other funerals were almost empty, and considering the mystery shrouding the people being buried, it was almost expected. Cassidy's funeral was no different. But nothing could prepare Veronica for the loneliness of the whole affair.

Cassidy's father was still MIA, and his mother was in Europe. Dick was there, brokenly crying in a corner, and Mac stood uncomfortably in the back, leaving halfway to throw up in the bathroom. Since no one knew if they should feel horrified that Beaver was dead or grateful he had been murdered, they just didn't come. The grass was green, and the coffin was black, and the sun shone obscenely overhead. The eulogy was simple, the ubiquitous "dust to dust" speech that Veronica almost knew by heart now.

After the funeral she wondered if Cassidy would be joining her. But he never did. People, well if you could call them that, wandered through now and then, ghostly and far away, and Veronica managed to have a long heartfelt talk with Lynn Echolls about Logan and Aaron and what they would do if things had been different, but no one else from Neptune was there. Actually, Lynn was the only person she's seen that was really _there_. The rest are just whispers and rustles that brush against her skin and make her wonder if someone else is here, someone important. But no one important is here. Veronica is so, so much alone, and she sometimes ends up making lists to herself, such as "The 10 Best Stakeouts Ever", or "The Top 5 Missed Opportunities I Had With Logan Echolls", or even "The 7 Movie Previews I Remember That I Am Upset About Because I Will Never See The Actual Movie They Were For", and once "10 Ways of Doing My Hair I Miss the Most", and the list that always makes her cry "100 Ways I Would Apologize To My Father For Dying".

The next funeral is the hardest and she catalogues details about it that she thinks about in the time that if she slept would be right before she woke up. The flowers were dark red, and it was indoors, in a beautiful church. There was a crucifix with a bleeding Christ on it that gave Veronica the creeps. The carpet leading up to the casket was a dark, almost black green, and it looked so depressing, so ugly and hateful and dead that she wished she could rip it up into tiny bits. No matter how many times Veronica rewound her thoughts about that horrible carpet, she never felt remorse about sounding so crazy about an inanimate object. The carpet _was_ evil. The coffin was closed, and it was a deep cherry stained wood. It was shiny, and light gleamed off it, sending rays of brightness into the otherwise dark church. There were exactly 27 people there. She didn't know half of them. The pews were dark wood, and they looked uncomfortable. The mood was too somber, too stuffy for whom they were burying, although the actual burying took place later. Veronica watched that too.

His headstone was simple, just two words, Logan Echolls. He was buried in the same cemetery as Lilly, and Veronica thought he'd have appreciated it. But she had no way of knowing if he did, or if he could even think. She thought about him all the time. Was he here like her? Or was he just gone, completely obliterated, nothing?

Maybe he was in Heaven, if there was such a thing, or maybe the other one, the place with a bit more brimstone. But he had been a good person. Well, not really, but he hadn't been a bad one.

_She_ should be in hell. She says that to herself every night before she doesn't go to sleep. She should be in some burning place, being tortured in a fitting way, maybe something interesting like the Ancient Greeks always seemed to think up. She had killed Logan Echolls, and she needed to be punished. His funeral, that horrible dark day, the reason why there was yet another tacky memorial at the high school was because of her. Veronica Mars had killed Logan Echolls, and she would never forget that.

Logan was right. She wasn't a murderer, she wasn't a killer. Yet somehow, inconceivably, she had ended three lives. Three was a very big number. Three lives could stretch on forever, and three people could do incalculable things.

The night when she had killed, murdered, destroyed three human beings was on permanent repeat in her mind. No one that hadn't been on the rooftop that night knew exactly what happened, and the police were fuzzy on who killed whom. They never really thought Veronica did it after they uncovered Cassidy's history, and Aaron being killed by a hired gun on the same night cast suspicion on Logan. The answer to the questions of the public and the media were simple. Veronica Mars, aiming to shot Cassidy Casablancas had accidentally hit Logan Echolls because he jerked her arm away at the last minute. Veronica then shot Cassidy, and after she realized what she had done, she put the gun in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

It was easier now. She could look back without, without the almost-tears, the almost-nausea. She could look back without needing to explain. But it hurt so very much. It always would.

And every night where Veronica Mars should be tossing and turning, she lets herself rest. Not in the technical way, but something different. She lets herself forgive. She lets herself stop hating that person who was so violent and cruel for just one night.

Because at night, she can be a girl who never was, and never will be a murderer.

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Please R&R, even if you hated this story with a burning passion tell me why, and if there's anything I could do to salvage it. I've proof read this story, but I have no beta so if you see any grammar/spelling/anything that's generally confusing and I should make clearer, please tell me. It's the only way I can improve my writing. Thanks!


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